We’d been wanting to go to the Schnitzelhaus after riding past on the bus a few weeks or a month ago while doing our Project Spiral expedition.
Today we got to go there. This week’s restaurant visit was supposed to be pub food. The Schnitzelhaus isn’t a pub, but their food is close enough to pub food as far as I am concerned. 
I haven’t had good German food for a good while now, and it soon becomes evident how the other, more touristy, beer and German food restaurants in Sydney are lacking compared to this place.
The restaurant is in a beautiful old sandstone building that would be almost invisible from the road if it wasn’t for the large sign.
They even have a cute postbox!
It seems like a really homely restaurant, and I imagine in winter they have a roaring fire going in a fireplace, although I do admit I didn’t see a fireplace.
Old style Christmas deccos are up, and the place reminds me of the mountain hotels that we have visited in South Africa in the past.
We place our drinks order while we mull over the menu. Caro has a lemon, lime & bitters ($3.90), while I have an Almdudler ($4.10), a wildly popular (in Austria) Austrian lemonade. It’s nice. Very subtle and not too sweet.
For starters Caroline has a pretzel ($3.50). Lovely and warm from the oven, and nice and salty.
I decide to have the camembert ($9.90). It’s a cheese that I have not had in a very long time. The semi-circles of crumbed cheese are not at all oily and offer no hint of the ooziness of the cheese within. They were perhaps a little thinner than I’m used to, but they tasted very good, especially with the traditional cranberry sauce. I called them cheese schnitzels.
We shared two main courses. The first was the ‘Haus schnitzel’ ($27.90), a schnitzel so large that you can’t fit it and the chips on the plate without piling them on top of each other. I know someone who would complain that this causes a heat trap and makes the chips all soggy, but they actually were not soggy. I was impressed. The schnitzel was lovely and tender, tasty and the crumbing was lovely and again no excess oil. We also had it with a mushroom sauce that was very nice, although perhaps a little on the garlicky side for me personally.
The other main we had was the chicken Cordon Bleu ($23.00). Perhaps not specifically Austrian, but it was crumbed. It could be considered a schnitzel. I was very happy with it as you see from the next photo.
Yum yum, look at all that lovely Swiss cheese. I’ve loved Cordon Bleu for as long as I can remember, even from the days of visiting Caroline’s first workplace where they had a subsidised canteen and restaurant, where on the menu you could find an item called “Gordon Bleu” 
I might even go as far as saying that Cordon Bleu ranks as one of my all time favourite dishes.
The obligatory, but token vegetables ($5.50) were also ordered. Not bad, but nothing amazing either.
For dessert we had the strudel platter for two ($16.90). There were three type of strudel, apple, cherry & cheese and apricot & cheese, and they were served with cream and ice-cream. Nice.
They also have a schnitzel challenge where for $55 you can get a 1kg schnitzel with chips and a 1 litre beer. If you finish within an hour, you get a t-shirt, your name and photo on the wall of “Champions” and on their website. However there’s a $50 charge if you can’t hold that all down and, let’s say, dispose of it somewhere and they have to clean up! If you want to beat the record, you’ll have to down all that in under 14 minutes!
We had a really good time there. My only criticism is that it got very loud later in the evening, and service did slow down considerably once they were busier, but that said, at the beginning of our meal service was unbelievably fast.
Curiously, in Australia people seem to almost uniformly pronounce schnitzel as ‘snitsle’. It’s strange because I would have thought the pronunciation would be obvious. Maybe it’s just too difficult to get the ‘shn’ sound right? That said, I do like the term ‘snitty’ when referring to a schnitzel.
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